In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan

by Seth G. Jones

  At the close of his tenure as commander of Combined Forces Command—Afghanistan in 2007, Lieutenant General Eikenberry prophetically warned: “The long-term threat to campaign success, though, is the potential irretrievable loss of legitimacy of the Government of Afghanistan. If the Afghan Government is unable to counter population frustration with the lack of progress in reform and national development, the Afghan people may lose confidence in the nature of their political system.” The result, he cautioned, would be a point “at which the Government of Afghanistan becomes irrelevant to its people, and the goal of establishing a democratic, moderate, self-sustaining state could be lost forever.”33

  Corruption and Drugs

  For rural villagers, suffering under crushing poverty and pressure from the Taliban, there was one significant way out. Each spring, Afghanistan is awash in a beautiful sea of white, pink, red, and magenta poppy fields. For Afghans and Westerners, poppies have long symbolized sleep and death. The Minoan poppy goddess wore poppy-seed capsules, a source of narcosis, in garlands in her hair. In ancient Roman mythology, Somnus, the god of sleep, wore a crown of poppies and was frequently depicted lying in a bed of poppies. Likewise, the twin brothers Hypnos and Thanatos, the Greek gods of sleep and death, were often depicted carrying poppies in their hands. The Roman goddess of the harvest, Ceres, grew poppy to help her sleep after the loss of her daughter to Pluto, god of the underworld.

  For Afghanistan, this metaphor of sleep and death was all too apt. The cultivation, production, and trafficking of poppy skyrocketed after the U.S. invasion, which had a debilitating impact on governance and contributed to widespread corruption at all levels of the Afghan government. As Figure 11.1 illustrates, poppy cultivation increased virtually every year after the overthrow of the Taliban regime, though it decreased 19 percent between 2007 and 2008. The drug trade eroded efforts to improve governance, fostered widespread corruption throughout the government, and hampered the development of a licit economy.34

  The implications were staggering. “The drug problem is difficult to overstate,” Doug Wankel told me in late 2005 as we sipped tea in a cafeteria on the grounds of the U.S. Embassy in Kabul.35 Wankel, the director of the Office of Drug Control in the embassy, was a former Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) official who was hired in 2003 to organize the U.S. government’s counternarcotics effort in Afghanistan. He had previously served in Kabul as a young DEA official in the late 1970s. “I left on a flight to New Delhi a couple of hours before the Soviets rolled in,” he said. “People thought it was because I knew it was coming. I didn’t; I just happened to be leaving on a trip. But the Soviets branded me a C.I.A. agent, and so I couldn’t come back—until now, that is.”37 As we talked, the drug trade was down that year but still, he said, “it reaches into all facets of life in Afghanistan and undermines the very fabric of governance.”38

  FIGURE 11.1 Opium Poppy Cultivation, 1991–200836

  Laboratories in Afghanistan convert opium into morphine base, white heroin, or one of several grades of brown heroin. But they could not do it alone. Afghanistan produces no essential or precursor chemicals for the conversion of opium into morphine base. Acetic anhydride—the most commonly used acetylating agent in heroin processing—is regularly smuggled into Afghanistan from Pakistan, India, Central Asia, China, and Europe. Some of the largest processing labs are located in Badakhshan, Nangarhar, and Helmand Provinces.39 Most of the opiates produced in Afghanistan are smuggled to markets in the West, although some were consumed in Afghanistan or the region as both opium and heroin. U.S. intelligence estimates indicate, for example, that “hundreds of kilograms of high-grade heroin destined for Saudi Arabia and Kuwait transit Iraq each month from the source countries of Afghanistan and Iran.”40 Afghan heroin moves via many routes; traffickers adjust their routes constantly based on law-enforcement and political actions. Afghan traffickers travel mostly by car and truck on overland routes to move drug shipments out of the country. Illicit drug convoys go regularly to southern and western Pakistan, while smaller shipments of heroin are sent through the frontier provinces to Karachi for onward shipment to the United States.41

  “Drugs are critical for insurgent survival in southern Afghanistan,” one 82nd Airborne intelligence officer told me at Bagram Air Base, thirty miles north of Kabul and the hub of U.S. forces operating in eastern Afghanistan. “Insurgents further north along the Afghan-Pakistan border,” he said, “get funding from a range of other sources like wealthy Arabs, zakat from mosques, and the trade in goods such as timber. But not a lot of drugs.”42

  Drug and other criminal groups have developed an intricate transportation network connecting Afghanistan to Pakistan and other neighboring countries. The Taliban was involved at all levels: with farmers, opium brokers, lab operators, smugglers, and major drug barons, as well as the export to international markets. Where they controlled territory, the Taliban levied a tax on poppy farmers and offered farmers protection from the government’s eradication efforts. The Taliban was also paid by drug-trafficking organizations to provide security along key routes. And a number of Taliban fighters were directly involved in the poppy harvest, thus largely unavailable to fight until after the harvest ends in the spring.43

  The Taliban had long been involved in drug trafficking. In 1997, for example, the Taliban received $75 million from drug smuggling between Afghanistan and Pakistan.44 They had been nominally opposed to drugs, even creating an antinarcotics office. But they often turned a blind eye to the industry. The head of the Taliban’s antinarcotics forces in Kandahar was quoted as saying that “opium is permissible because it is consumed by kafirs [unbelievers] in the West and not by Muslims or Afghans.”45

  According to Afghan intelligence estimates, roughly 30 percent of the Taliban’s income came from involvement in drug trafficking.46 But Afghan government officials were equally culpable. News reports circulated about high-level Afghan government officials involved in the drug trade. One of those most often accused was Ahmed Wali Karzai, brother of President Hamid Karzai. ABC News, for example, obtained U.S. military documents that alleged that the president’s brother “receives money from drug lords as bribes to facilitate their work and movement.”47 And an investigative New York Times article that included interviews with senior U.S. government officials reported: “The White House says it believes that Ahmed Wali Karzai is involved in drug trafficking, and American officials have repeatedly warned President Karzai that his brother is a political liability.”48 A number of senior U.S. intelligence officials, however, argued that the information on Ahmed Wali Karzai was based on second-and thirdhand reporting, and sometimes from people with an ax to grind against the Karzais.49 Whatever the reality, there was certainly a strong perception among some Afghans that he was complicit in the drug trade.

  There were also regular allegations that other government officials were involved in bribery and drug trafficking. An investigative report by The Times (London), for example, named several individuals, including General Azzam, chief of staff to the interior minister. The report found that the “Ministry of Interior, key to establishing security in the country, remains the worst offender.” It found evidence pointing to “General Azzam, recently appointed Chief of Operations after his stint as Chief of Staff, and his deputy General Reshad as the prime recipients of bribes.” The Afghan government categorized Afghanistan’s thirty-four provinces using a three-tiered scale. “A” denoted those with the highest potential profits for drug running; “C” provinces were the least remunerative; and “B” provinces were in between. Counter-narcotics officials estimated that one border police commander in eastern Afghanistan took home $400,000 a month from heroin smuggling.50 At the very least, these allegations increased the perception among Afghans that their government was corrupt, including those officials who were supposed to be leading counternarcotics efforts. As an editorial in the newspaper Daily Afghanistan summarized:

  People definitely do not trust the government. Governors warn tha
t nobody should cultivate poppies and say the poppy fields will be destroyed, but they encourage farmers to keep up poppy cultivation by any means because the government officials make most of their money from poppy cultivation. There are reports that a minister ordered farmers to cultivate only poppies…. The government should identify these corrupt officials and should not fail to cut off their hands; otherwise it will face further challenges.51

  There were some occasional bright spots in the drug war. In 2005, for instance, American and Afghan officials were cheered when poppy-cultivation numbers dropped, though they soared even higher the next year. Most of the reduction appeared to have been the result of Herculean efforts by Afghan leaders with international support. One of the most significant of these counternarcotics programs was implemented by the governor of Nangarhar, Haji Din Muhammad, and the police chief, Hazrat Ali.

  They were an odd couple. Haji Din Muhammad came from a distinguished Pashtun family, and his great-grandfather, Wazir Arsala Khan, served as foreign minister of Afghanistan in 1869. Six feet tall and well built, Muhammad had an imposing presence. He was well educated and had the aura of an elder statesman, with a gentle demeanor, preferring to speak in soft, measured tones and capable of pontificating for hours. Hazrat Ali couldn’t have been more different. He was not a Pashtun but a Pashai, an ethnic group with a distinct language concentrated in northeastern Afghanistan. He had grown up in the isolated mountain village of Kushmoo, earning him the derogatory nickname Shurrhi, meaning “redneck” or “hillbilly” in Pashto. He was also illiterate, which did little to legitimize him among the Pashtun elite in Nangarhar. But Hazrat Ali was fortunate. He had been catapulted to power during the overthrow of the Taliban regime through the patronage of U.S. Special Forces. They had provided him money and weapons to target Taliban forces, and they viewed him as a reliable ally because of his close ties to Northern Alliance leaders.

  Despite their differences, Haji Din Muhammad and Hazrat Ali developed a common strategy to decrease poppy in Nangarhar. Under Hazrat Ali’s orders, police jailed locals who cultivated poppy until they agreed to plow under their fields.52 The coercion was effective. According to public-opinion polling in Nangarhar, most villagers reported that they reduced or stopped poppy cultivation out of concern that they would be imprisoned or that their fields would be plowed under by Afghan authorities.53 In addition, Haji Din Muhammad and Hazrat Ali leveraged the support for President Karzai in the region to convince villagers to buy into the counternarcotics plan. Almost three-fourths of the eradication (72 percent) in 2005 took place in Nangarhar and Helmand Provinces, where, in 2004, poppy cultivation had ranked highest in the nation.54 Indeed, provinces where declines in cultivation were most striking (Nangarhar—96 percent, Badakshan—53 percent), and where cultivation remained relatively stable (Helmand—10 percent), were the same three provinces that received the largest contributions for alternative development. Nangarhar received $70.1 million in assistance and Badakshan and Helmand received $47.3 million and $55.7 million, respectively.55

  Yet these successes were no match for the broader problems in the justice system. Studying Afghan perceptions of the rule of law, the World Bank found that Afghanistan’s justice system was in the bottom 5 percent in the world by 2006, the exact same ranking as in 2000, the last full year of the Taliban regime.56 Reconstruction had done nothing to improve things. In comparison with other countries in the region—such as Iran, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan—Afghanistan’s justice system was the least effective. A major reason for this was endemic corruption. Unqualified personnel loyal to various factions were sometimes installed as court officials, and the Supreme Court and the Attorney General’s Office were accused of significant wrongdoing.57

  An Afghanistan intelligence assessment complained that “criminals do not receive fair justice. This is another factor which has boosted the Taliban morale in southern Afghanistan. They are almost confident that they can buy justice at some stage.”58 A corrupt judiciary was a serious impediment to the success of the counternarcotics campaign. But more broadly, it further undermined governance and popular support for Karzai’s government, and it crippled the legal and institutional mechanism necessary to prosecute insurgents and criminals.

  Afghans were well aware of the problem. An Asia Foundation poll in 2006 found that 77 percent of respondents said corruption was a major problem in Afghanistan; 66 percent believed corruption was a major problem in the provincial government; 42 percent said corruption was a major problem in their daily lives; and 40 percent said corruption was a major problem in their neighborhoods. Moreover, most Afghans believed that the corruption problem was getting worse. Approximately 60 percent of respondents believed that corruption had increased over the past year at the national level, and 50 percent believed that it had increased at the provincial level. Many had been directly involved in bribery, such as providing cash to a government official. Thirty-six percent said they had been involved in bribery with a police officer, 35 percent with a court official, and 34 percent with officials when applying for work.59 Things were much worse in the areas of greater Taliban presence. People in southern and western Afghanistan were most likely to say they had personally experienced corruption, and those in central and northern Afghanistan were the least likely.60

  Much of the blame was leveled at the top echelons of the Afghan government. A 2006 State Department poll found that more than 50 percent of Afghans thought President Karzai and his administration failed to combat corruption. This tended to fuel support for the Taliban. According to the same State Department poll, 71 percent of Taliban backers said there was corruption among the police, 66 percent said there was corruption in the local government, and 68 percent said there was corruption in the courts.61

  A number of sensitive Afghan national security documents expressed growing alarm at the link between poppy and government corruption. The Afghanistan National Security Council’s annual National Threat Assessment, for example, argued in 2004 that the “continued growth of the heroin and opium-producing poppy remains a major threat to the security of Afghanistan. The corruption and crime association with the drug trade will proliferate in and around Afghanistan, discouraging international investment and assistance in rebuilding Afghanistan.”62 The following year’s National Threat Assessment went even further, noting that the “corruption and crime associated with the drug trade will proliferate in Afghan society and the government administration.”63

  The cost of corruption, according to numerous Afghan and international assessments, was increased support for the Taliban and other insurgent groups. One joint European Union and United Nations assessment found that the Taliban “exploit certain sentiments that resonated within the general population,” such as the “corrupt state.”64 An Afghan intelligence report concluded: “The propaganda effort of the enemy in rural areas is massive and strong. The theme is corruption in the government…. Their main target population is rural Afghanistan…. only good governance and sound leadership at the local level can counter this effectively and strongly.”65 The Taliban and other insurgent groups pointed out in their propaganda the growing Afghan corruption on the district, provincial, and national levels. A joint paper produced by the Government of Afghanistan, the U.S. government, and other key international actors more boldly concluded: “The appointment of unprofessional, corrupt and ineffective government officials has reduced the trust and confidence of the people, especially in the provinces.”66

  A Cancer in the Government

  Reflecting on his term as Afghan foreign minister, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah told me in 2007 that his government had made some mistakes. “Where are the state institutions?” he asked. “There aren’t any.” We were sitting in his flat in Kabul, which was comfortably furnished with plush chairs and Western amenities, including a flat-screen television. Since it was Ramadan, Abdullah was fasting, but he thoughtfully offered me a glass of cold water. He said, ruefully, that “people are losing
hope in their government. Villages cannot be protected. If villagers say something against the Taliban, they could be beheaded. We are losing the support of our population.”67

  Abdullah was an ophthalmologist and a protégé of Ahmed Shah Massoud, the charismatic Northern Alliance military leader. Well organized and smartly dressed, with a neatly trimmed beard, often preferring Western suit and tie to native Afghan clothes, he spoke excellent English with a slight accent. During the Bonn negotiations in late 2001, Abdullah impressed U.S. and other Western diplomats by joining them at meals during the month of Ramadan, even though he was fasting. “He always said he felt no pangs of hunger,” recalled U.S. Special Envoy James Dobbins, who worked with Abdullah. Dobbins described him as someone who “would speak with controlled passion about the travails his country had experienced over the past several decades.”68 Abdullah’s comments about Afghan governance were a sobering and brutally frank admission of the challenges his government faced. They were seconded by a former Afghan provincial governor who complained: “The government has essentially collapsed. It has lost its meaning in the provinces, it has lost the security situation and lost its grip on civil servants. Corruption is playing havoc with the country.”69